Third All-Russia Congress of Soviets, Resolutions on Peace. January 27, 1918
Socialist-Revolutionaries
The Third All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, wholly approving the foreign policy of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars, hails all the steps of Soviet power designed to bring about an end to the worldwide carnage and establish a universal democratic peace.
The Third Congress voices complete confidence that further staunch defense of the Russian revolution’s formula of peace will frustrate the overt annexationist designs of the German and Allied imperialists and lead to the complete triumph of the Russian socialist revolution.
The Third Congress, greeting the ever mounting revolutionary movement of the broad masses of working people in Austria-Hungary and other countries, firmly believes that the working class of the whole world will help the insurgent working people of Russia to end the war on principles undermining the rule of world imperialism, and will help to lead the whole of mankind, oppressed and bled white, on to the road of complete triumph of Socialism.
Bolsheviks
The All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Peasants’ and Soldiers’ Deputies confirms and approves all the statements and steps of Soviet power aimed at achieving a universal democratic peace.
The All-Russia Congress states that the terms laid down by the Austro-German delegation are not only a trampling underfoot of the principles of democracy but a complete repudiation of the principles the delegations of the Central Empires recognized in the declaration of December 12 (25).
The Central Empires are getting under their sway the Poles, Lithuanians, half of the Latvians, part of the Ukrainians, Belorussians and Estonians and, depriving them of the right to genuine self-determination, are forcibly affirming in their midst the rule of the privileged and propertied upper crust. Thus the military occupation which the Central Empires intend to maintain even after the conclusion of universal peace is directly aimed against the implementation of a democratic peace on the principles proclaimed by the Russian revolution.
The All-Russia Congress expresses its firm belief that this annexationist policy (counter-revolutionary measures) will prove powerless to cut off the working people of Russia from the working people of Germany and Austria-Hungary.
In the powerful protest of the workers of Vienna, Lower Austria and Hungary against the annexationist peace, in the awakening revolutionary movement of the proletariat of Germany, the All-Russia Congress sees the best guarantee against an imperialist peace based on enslavement and coercion and camouflaged indemnity.
Proclaiming again for the whole world to hear the striving of the Russian people for an immediate termination of the war, the All-Russia Congress instructs its delegation to uphold the principles of peace stemming from the program of the Russian revolution.
Long live an honest democratic peace!
Long live the revolutionary fraternity of the peoples!
Source: Decrees of the Soviet Government (Moscow: Institute of Marxism-Leninism, 1957), Vol. I, pp. 348-350.